Alums in the news, presidential campaign edition

12052008

Independent alum Trevor Potter ’78 is, according to the usually reliable New York Times, the lawyer for the McCain campaign. He was quoted in a May 9 Times article on the latest developments in the endless controversy over the composition of the Federal Election Commission:

President Bush also decided on Tuesday to pull a pending renomination of the current chairman of the commission, David M. Mason, a Republican. Mr. Mason raised questions this year about Mr. McCain’s right to withdraw from the public financing system for the primary.

Advocacy groups that work to counter the influence of money in politics immediately assailed the White House action, arguing it could be construed only as a blatantly political act, meant to benefit the McCain campaign.

“President Bush’s dumping of Mason can only be viewed as a bald-faced and brazen attempt to wrongly manipulate an important enforcement decision by the nation’s campaign finance enforcement agency,” said Fred Wertheimer, president of Democracy 21, an advocacy group, in a statement.

In response, the Times cited a post by “the campaign’s lawyer and a former FEC Chairman himself, Trevor Potter.”

Not surprisingly, he doesn’t care much for the inference that Sen. McCain had anything to do with Mason’s failure to be renominated. You can read his entire post here and decide for yourself whether the whole contretemps is just another remarkable election-year coincidence.